Chapter 2: First Farmer: The revolution of agriculture

In the past two centuries, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers worldwide, as productivity of modern agriculture increased. But in the last 12,000 years, most people worked in agriculture. Agriculture is the basis for almost all human developments. The transformation to agriculture brought about a new relationship between humans and other living things. People started to have domesticated plants and animals and develop unique skills. Moreover, people started to live in larger group because agriculture enabled them to extract more food from a given area. The end of the Ice age made possible more human migrations, was followed by warmer, wetter weather that allowed more wild plants to flourish and resulted in the extinction of many large mammals, which were good for hunting. These conditions led to the independent rise of agriculture in several world regions, such as Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, several areas in sub-Saharan Africa, China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica, the Andes eastern North America. The early agricultural practices and productivity differed widely between these regions. However, the search for better farming lands and the development of cheaper methods of transportation resulted in the gradual spread of techniques and perhaps plants and animals and sometimes the colonization or migration of agricultural peoples though conquest, absorption, or displacement of gatherers and hunters. Cultural and languages also spread with agriculture. By the beginning of the Common Era, gathering and hunting peoples were a small minority of humankind. Farming societies dominated because they were larger and more sophisticated. They were more organized and less vulnerable to environmental changes. The process and characteristics of the rise of agricultural societies resembles the rise of industrial societies these days except that the later is happening much faster, thanks to the much cheaper transportation methods. Languages and cultures of industrial societies are spreading widely and agricultural societies have been absorbed or conquered by industrial nations.